Efficacy of Seismic Interferometry in Removing Surface Waves from Active Seismic Records

While there are seismic techniques which make use of surface waves in imaging the subsurface, there are also those where these types of waves are considered coherent noise. Important examples where the surface waves may significantly degrade the obtained images include different types of reflection seismic surveys (e.g., shallow surveys for engineering, environmental and groundwater investigations, and deep surveys for imaging hydrocarbon reservoirs). In a strongly heterogeneous medium (encountered typically in onshore surveys), the conventional methods for attenuating these waves (such as f-k "velocity" filtering) often do not give satisfactory results.